Welcome to Lockport, RubberForm Recycled Products.
A promising new manufacturing business is readying for an August startup on Michigan Street. In the former site of Johnson Rose Corp., siblings Bill and Deborah Robbins are pursuing a dream of turning environmental consciousness into a profit-making venture. If all goes well, it’ll be a win-win for the Robbins and the region.
RubberForm is taking shredded rubber from the High Tread plant on Ohio Street and will turn it into durable goods like sign bases, parking lot wheel stops, speed bumps and curbing. If the demand is there, the company may move into household and automotive goods production.
The interesting thing about this business is that it’s entrepreneurship with edge. The Robbins, a duo from the Rochester area whose first careers were marketing and health care, are well-educated in the ins and outs of recycling as an economic as well as social/environmental good. RubberForm will press 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of shredded rubber per day, the equivalent of up to 600 vehicle tires per day that won’t be land- filled or left to rot on the roadside.
Businesses like RubberForm represent the new wave in the U.S. manufacturing. New companies are harnessing technology to meet the needs and demands of an affluent, post-industrial society. Industry is not dead in America, it simply is moving to a higher level.
Lockport has plenty to offer in the new wave, including a government structure that seems attuned to cultivating possibilities with the private sector. Location of new industries for the city seems slow-going but Bill Robbins has had nothing but praise for Greater Lockport Development Corporation and its director, Bill Evert, for their helpfulness in facilitating Rubberform’s development. That’s good to hear.
By EDITOR – Lockport Union-Sun & Journal